I was cleaning the other day and found these random thoughts from 2013 and thought it would be fun to post them here. Note, these are my thoughts and are not currently backed up by much science.

  1. Doing low-intensity treadmill work after lifting heavy stuff is stupid.  You are pulling your body in the wrong direction, and you are not going to burn that much more fat.  When you are done, just leave.
  2. If you hit a major 6-12 month PR, leave.  End on a high note.  Are you really going to do any better?  Leave your body with that adaptation time to cement in.
  3. Along those lines, when you have a good strength day, do mostly strength work (low reps) and strike while the iron is hot.  Keep all the adaptations going in the same direction and don’t get on the damn treadmill at the end.
  4. Sleep seems to affect strength primarily threw the REM phase and “cardio” capacity via total duration.
  5. How can we predict a good strength day or more lactate work-based day?  Does it matter?
  6. HRV is cool and seems to be associated more to “stress absorption” than prediction of performance.   Higher (better) HRV scores allow the body to handle more stress (all forms).  It does NOT seem to predict a good from bad strength session, but it does help the ability to REPEAT good sessions back to back over time.  If your HRV tanks, you will not be able to do repeated, hard sessions, day in and out without paying a higher cost.
  7. Post-training breathing/meditation work appears to help return the body faster to a parasympathetic state and kickstart recovery.  HRV score is normally better the next day too. Try it.
  8. Heavier higher rep compound exercise appears to help with recovery the next day as long as you don’t push too hard.   Trap bar DLs for reps of 20+ for sets of 1-4 with complete rest seems to do the trick.
  9. Parasympathetic activity is associated more with fat usage, sympathetic with more carb use.  Being stressed out and in a sympathetic state all the time is impairing your body’s ability to use fat.  Bad news for love handles and seeing your unit again any time soon.
  10. Any program that does carb cycling of any form is using metabolic flexibility–teaching the body to use both fat and carbs primarily via changing insulin levels.  This is a good thing.

I warned you these were random thoughts! Let me know what you think.

Rock on!
Dr. Mike
flexdiet.com
miketnelson.com